In Darfur

In Darfur is the provocative account of three intertwined lives at a camp for internally displaced persons In Darfur. The story follows an aid worker's mission to save and protect lives, a journalist's pursuit to deliver a "Page One" story and a Darfuri woman's quest for safety. It is a searing story of urgency and international significance.

Productions / Awards

In Darfur is the recipient of The Guthrie Theater and Playwrights’ Center’s Two-Headed Challenge 2006 commission under the mentorship of New York Times journalist and Pulitzer winner Nicholas Kristof and developed at the Guthrie Theater, the Playwrights Center Playlabs, Geva Theater’s Hibernatus Interruptus and The Public Theatre’s New Works Now. In Darfur inaugurated the Public’s Lab series in April 2007 for a sold out three week run, and filled to capacity a staged reading at the 1800-seat Delacorte Theater on July 9th, 2007. Simultaneously, on July 9th, the Donmar Warehouse held a reading. The Tricycle Theater held a reading in December 2007, for A Day for Darfur. The play has been produced by Washington DC’s Theater J, Atlanta’s Horizon, Florida’s Mosaic, Canada’s Theater Awakening, and multiple benefit readings nationwide.

In Darfur was directed for the Public Theater by Joanna Settle
With dramaturgy by Polly Carl and Mandy Hackett
Cast: Rutina Wesley, Heather Raffo, Aaron Lohr, Sharon Washington, Zainab Jah, Maduka Steady, Ron Brice
Production photos from The Public production

Quotes about the play

Rutina Wesley & Heather Raffo. Photo by Joy Jacobs.

“Winter's play is an urgent and passionate response to a crisis unfolding at this moment.”
—Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director, the Public Theater

“Illuminates and entertains. Winter takes us into the hearts of her characters and swiftly pulls us into their story.”
—Mia Farrow, actress and activist.

“‘In Darfur’ is based on a real case In Darfur’s Kalma camp that I once reported on. It’s an excellent poignant play.”
—Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times columnist and Pulitzer winner for his commentary on Darfur’s genocide.

“A play that forces us to question our moral responsibility to the victims of human rights abuse.”
--Lynn Nottage, Pulitzer winning playwright, Ruined

“Urgent and fierce. Timely and Timeless. Unfolds at the cusp of calamity, inching up on genocide and whether to name it or not. Truly a heroic act of playwriting.
--Ari Roth, Artistic Director, Theater J

Rutina Wesley. Photo by Joy Jacobs.

Winter's Notes

In 2006, when I wrote In Darfur, I was working as columnist Nicholas Kristof’s researcher at The New York Times. On one of his trips to the Chad/Sudan border, Nick let me accompany him.

We slept in aid compounds and underneath the stars of a stunning night sky. We met young children with bandaged bullet wounds and girls who had been raped not 48 hours earlier but told their story because they thought we could help the people of Darfur. We walked through burned and bombed villages, now ghost towns. We were offered tea and food by those who had little of either. We saw overcrowded refugee camps and lines of survivors waiting to enter.

I saw my first human dying, a man—not even twenty—shot down because he was a mercenary Janjaweed, like many. His life came down to two hundred dollars; that’s what he’d been offered to kill the leader of his same tribe in a neighboring village.

Tribal divisions, colonization and corruption are complicated to unravel, but halting a genocide is simple. It takes international leadership and a few decisive bold pen strokes. Included in this book are resources for those who are inclined not to remain bystanders while tens of thousands suffer needlessly.

Press: Full Articles

‘Darfur’ shocks as tale of inhumanity, survival

By Hedy Weiss Theater Critic, Jan 26, 2011

It begins with one of those harrowing car rides through a war zone — the kind where sniper fire can come from any angle, a land mine might be set off at any point, and for varying reasons, each occupant of the vehicle might be prime prey for “the rebels,” or “government forces,” or whoever is carrying an automatic weapon.

The road leads out of Sudan and into the neighboring African nation of Chad. And as to why the three people in the car ­— Carlos, an American doctor of Argentine descent; Maryka, an American correspondent for a major newspaper, and Hawa, a horribly brutalized Sudanese woman who is now a refugee — are in a state of high anxiety will become the focus of Winter Miller’s “In Darfur.” The play is receiving its Chicago premiere in a fiercely vivid, ingeniously crafted multimedia production by TimeLine Theatre, where director Nick Bowling (“The History Boys”) has forged a terrific collaboration with his outstanding design team comprised of Andrew Hansen, Mike Tutaj, Amanda Sweger, Lindsey Pate, Nic Jones and Jesse Klug.

The show is accompanied by a handsome photo display and copious program notes that attempt to explain the horrors that have unfolded in the Darfur region of Sudan since the 1980s. And you will wonder: Has this place been the site of a genocide, ethnic cleansing, civil war or just a mad and vicious land grab for a largely barren desert?

But the play, whose author was a research assistant for New York Times correspondent Nicholas Kristof and accompanied him on one of his many trips to Darfur, goes beyond docudrama to deal with many more wide-ranging issues. It asks: How is news about Africa dealt with by the media, whether the New York Times or Al Jazeera? What do journalistic ethics really mean these days? Are do-good aide workers useless in calamitous wartime situations? And how do the victims of war, particularly women, manage to carry on in life?

The story is this: Hawa (the richly expressive Mildred Marie Langford) is an educated Muslim woman who has studied literature in Khartoum and is fluent in English. She watched as her husband and son were murdered in their native village. She herself was gang-raped and is now pregnant. Stumbling into a refugee camp, she is treated by a volunteer doctor, Carlos (Gregory Isaac), but when a rebel soldier invades the camp he beats Hawa with horrific savagery (the reality of this scene is beyond shocking), and Carlos can do nothing but stand by in total impotence.

Meanwhile, Maryka (Kelli Simpkins) is struggling to get Darfur on the front page despite the barriers raised by Jan (Tyla Abercrumbie), her editor at the Times, who just happens to be a black woman. The story is too complicated, Jan tells her, it needs harder evidence, and there is competing news from other global hot spots. A human face is needed. Hawa, the teacher who loves Edith Wharton’s novels, fits the bill. And so to bring attention to Darfur (and herself), Maryka betrays Hawa, putting her life in further jeopardy.

Miller’s play can feel a bit forced at times, but she covers a lot of ground, and like a good working journalist, she knows what she must do to make her story accessible. The subtly angry-sexy scenes between Carlos and Maryka are perfection. And there is fine supporting work by Brian-Alwyn Newland, Eddie Jordan III and Ebony Wimbs. You will not walk away indifferent.

TimeLine finds the heart in Africa story despite some obstacles

In 2006, a young playwright named Winter Miller persuaded the globe-trotting New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof to let her hitch a ride as he travelled along the border of Chad and the Darfur region of Sudan. He was reluctant — it's a very dangerous part of the world — but Miller was his research assistant, a persistent research assistant, and she told Kristof that a consciousness-raising play about the genocide in Darfur would result.

As Kristof has written in his blog, the two travelled in an area that had been mostly abandoned by aid organizations, with the notable exception of Doctors Without Borders. And they talked to genocide survivors, who courageously recounted narratives of unspeakable horror.

“In Darfur,” which opened this past weekend in a very accomplished Nick Bowling production at the TimeLine Theatre in Chicago, is the play that Miller promised Kristof she would write.

It's not a straight-up docudrama featuring characters based on the author and her mentor (which would, I think, have been a better idea). Instead, Miller creates a fictional, hard-bitten correspondent for the New York Times (played here by Kelli Simpkins) and a young and passionate doctor (Gregory Isaac) for an aid organization clearly based on Doctors Without Borders.

The play is about both the experiences and personal strength of Hawa (Mildred Marie Langford), an English teacher who watches her loved ones die and suffers all manner of horrific physical abuse, and about the attempts of the reporter to get past her confounding editor (played by Tyla Abercrumbie) and get the story of the genocide in Darfur on the front page of the Times — and in the consciousness of the world.

Thanks in no small measure to a simple and straightforward but rich and moving performance from Langford, the piece is very successful in encapsulating the struggles of a character surely based on the survivors whose stories are no doubt etched on Miller's soul. It is less successful at telling a tale of journalistic power and politics, mostly because Miller struggles to do so without subtlety or verisimilitude.

Instead, we get reporter and editor barking at each other like characters out of “The Front Page.” And in an attempt to inject some tension into the piece, she conflates whether or not Darfur will be noticed or ignored by the Western world for all time, with whether or not a particular story lands on page A1 or A19. The Times is a powerful organ, and thus tool for consciousness-raisers, and I understand Miller was on one of its writer's payroll. But there's a big media world out there.

For sure, a crucial part of any story set in Darfur is how and why the West chose to ignore the suffering taking place there. And editors can be a pain in the neck, trust me, especially when a writer has to explain something she is seeing on the ground to someone who seems more interested in internal politics. But it's a fact of journalistic life that we don't advertise our more mercurial instincts (we instead hide them well in our language), and also that editor and writer generally try to get on the same side, especially with this kind of heart-wrenching story. Abercrumbie does her best with a one-dimensional (and seemingly cruel) character, but it's tough. And although Simpkins also fleshes out her reporter as much as she can, I fear you'll have seen this hard-bitten, soft-centered type in a few too many other plays and movies.

So this isn't a great play. But Bowling and his videographer Mike Tutaj (truly a peerless master at the terribly tricky combination of video and intimate live action) have turned it into a very powerful 100 minutes, including an automobile escape that really should look trite but that Bowling and Tutaj turn into a genuinely tense and thrilling sequence of theatrical events that make the dust and dirt of Darfur rise up to meet you.

The piece is theatricalized with such immediacy that you won't turn away for a moment.

Isaac, a young Chicago actor with a lot of potential, skillfully captures a character who has suddenly been confronted with terrifying depths of human cruelty and that shakes him to the core. And when Langford has the stage, when this fine actress gets the chance to represent the real human pain on the ground, the piece hits you in the gut.

Black History stories travel to Liberia, Darfur, Rome and Texas

By Kerry Reid, January 20, 2011

"Ruined," Lynn Nottage's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about women in the Congo that began at the Goodman Theatre (and will soon be a movie starring Oprah Winfrey), showed that American audiences respond to stories about black life that go beyond our own history — and Chicago theaters have been filling that bill with plays by both black and white writers focusing on recent African history. (Yes, sometimes these plays raise thorny questions about who has earned the right to tell these stories.)

J.T. Rogers' "The Overwhelming," staged at Next Theatre in 2009, tackled the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s. Danai Gurira's "In the Continuum," at the Goodman in 2007, juxtaposed two black women — one in South Central Los Angeles, the other in Zimbabwe — who discover that they are pregnant and HIV-positive.

This weekend's quartet of theater openings features work by Gurira and Rogers, along with plays by Goodman artistic associate Regina Taylor and journalist/playwright Winter Miller. One strong thread runs through all of them: the voices of women fighting to control their own lives in harrowing circumstances.

'Eclipsed'

The Iowa-born, Zimbabwe-raised Gurira is the one playwright of the four with immediate African roots. "Eclipsed" focuses on five women during the Second Liberian Civil War (1999-2003), and it was inspired by the same swaggering photo of a Liberian female soldier that was behind J. Nicole Brooks' semi-satirical "Black Diamond: The Year the Locusts Have Eaten" at Lookingglass Theatre in 2007.

But Gurira's research with Liberian women who lived through the conflict showed her that "there was no way to make this the perfect 'Rambo' story. It wasn't good/bad. It was war. And it wasn't pretty. No one's actions, once you pick up a gun, are pretty."

Gurira's play is directed by Hallie Gordon and stars Steppenwolf ensemble member Alana Arenas (who played the title role in "Black Diamond"). As a white American director working with an African story, Gordon says: "Doing any kind of culturally different play is challenging for all the obvious reasons — location, economics, politics, class, race. The thing I love about 'Eclipsed' is that it is so very fundamentally character-driven."

Arenas observes: "Getting beyond stories that are about yourself is one of the joys of going to the theater. I think one of the barriers we have with dealing with our own race issues here is that we assume we can only be interested in stories about our own experience."

"You're going to have to watch African women tell their stories, and there's no way out," says Gurira. "And guess what? You'll actually relate to it. I'm so tired of having the white protagonist with African stories."

'In Darfur'

It's true that many stories about Africa, particularly in movies, tend to put white or Western characters front and center (Leonardo DiCaprio in "Blood Diamond" comes to mind). Though white protagonists figure prominently in Miller's drama, she also takes a hard-edged look at the tragic, unintended consequences that can occur when journalists report from the inside of genocidal chaos.

Maryka, a New York Times writer, and Carlos, an Argentina-born aid worker, try to help Hawa, a pregnant woman raped by the janjaweed militia who laid waste to the embattled Darfur region of Sudan.

Miller's play grew out of her role as researcher for New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof — she traveled with Kristof to Darfur in 2006.

She says: "I know how hard it is to get a story about Africa on the front page. I purposely wrote it with two Western characters to make it appealing to Western audiences."

Miller, who is white, points out that black American writers also face issues of authenticity in writing about African experience, and notes that she and Nottage met while working on "In Darfur" and "Ruined," respectively, so they could "talk about what it's like to write a play about stories that are not ours. We agreed that if we embarked upon telling it, we had the responsibility to tell it the best that we could."

(And that means, in part, incorporating dialogue in Arabic and Zaghawa, a Darfuri dialect.)

'The Trinity River Plays'

Taylor's triptych of one-acts, set in Dallas, is the homegrown offering of the four.

Like Gurira and Miller, she puts the experiences of black women front and center through the story of Iris, who as a teenager faces a traumatic experience, leaves home to become a writer and returns as an adult after her mother is diagnosed with cancer. Ethan McSweeny directs a cast that includes Chicago stalwart Karen Aldridge as the conflicted Iris and film and television star Penny Johnson Jerald as the nurturing mother, Rose. The story grew, in part, out of Taylor losing her own mother to ovarian cancer a few years ago, making "Trinity River" closer to home than her past work, which has reimagined Anton Chekhov through an African-American lens ("Drowning Crow" and "Magnolia") and drawn upon the life of black hair-care entrepreneur Madam C.J. Walker ("The Dreams of Sarah Breedlove").

Goodman artistic director Robert Falls acknowledges that the theater has produced several African-American writers, particularly women, in recent seasons.

In addition to Taylor, Gurira and Nottage, the Goodman has also presented work by Dael Orlandersmith, Ifa Bayeza and Tracey Scott Wilson. And Gurira's latest, "The Convert," set in 19th-century South Africa, just had a reading in the Goodman's New Stages series. But, says Falls: "None of this has to do with the Goodman's interest in saying to any writer: 'Oh, let's get out of exploration of the African-American experience in the United States and let's start exploring the larger stories in the world.' It's about the writer, first and foremost — what they choose to explore."

'Madagascar'

Though the title would suggest otherwise, Rogers' "Madagascar" is the outlier in this quartet of African-inspired plays. The African nation figures in at the edges — it's where one unseen character spent much of his life working as a Western economist, and where another disappears.

The three white American characters — a mother, a daughter and the mother's lover — appear at various times in the same hotel room in Rome, with the women in particular trying to come to grips with a family member's disappearance after he became an aid worker in Africa.

Says Rogers: "The title means everything from the real Madagascar to a mythical idea of a country that children have."

The play predates "The Overwhelming," in which a white American professor, his African-American wife and their teenage son get caught up in the Rwandan massacres.

On the topic of white Westerners writing about African issues, Rogers says: "I'm interested as an author and as a theatergoer in stories that are outward-looking and that engage the larger world — political and historical backdrops." And Rogers, like Miller, has done his research. (Gurira, who appeared in an early workshop of "The Overwhelming," says, "There were things he was tapping into that I felt were very idiosyncratically African.") For "Madagascar," Rogers says, an economist friend "gave me essentially an undergraduate degree in microeconomic theory."

Director Kimberly Senior, who staged "The Overwhelming," says: "The interesting thing in 'Madagascar' is that they are people with high-class problems, wealthy Americans. Instead of thinking that there is a colonial tendency among them, which there isn't, it's a sense that, 'My life is incomplete and there is a mystery to be unlocked someplace else that is more exotic.'"

Out of Africa — Three disparate productions highlight haunting aspects of the continent

By Hedy Weiss Theater Critic, Feb 22, 2011

South Africa was the subject of much powerhouse theater throughout the apartheid era, and Wole Soyinka wrote about Nigeria decades ago. But until recently, plays about other parts of Africa have been few and far between, despite the fact that the continent has been the focus of countless headlines, with datelines ranging from Kenya, Zimbabwe, Liberia and Sierra Leone to, most recently, Sudan and the Ivory Coast.

Lynn Nottage’s “Ruined,” the 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner that began life at the Goodman Theatre, and captured the terrible fate of women in the recent civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, certainly upped the ante. So did the Broadway musical, “Fela!,” with its celebration of Fela Kuti, the legendary Nigerian musician who popularized Afrobeat rhythms. And among other notable works seen here have been: J.T. Rogers’ “The Overwhelming,” set on the eve of the Rwandan genocide (a knockout at Next Theatre in 2009); J. Nicole Brooks’ vivid “Black Diamond,” about the Liberian civil war (at Lookingglass Theatre in 2007); and Bruce Norris’ “The Unmentionables,” about would-be American do-gooders in an unnamed West African nation (at Steppenwolf Theatre in 2006).

Now, in the coming week alone, three plays that deal either directly or indirectly with Africa are headed for major Chicago stages.

At Northlight Theatre you will find Hallie Gordon directing Danai Gurira’s “Eclipsed,” another play about the Liberian civil war and the terrible toll it exacted on women. (Gurira previously penned the award-winning “In the Continuum,” a look at an American woman and African woman, both victims of HIV, presented at the Goodman in 2007.)

At TimeLine Theatre, Nick Bowling is directing the Chicago premiere of “In Darfur,” a work by playwright and journalist Winter Miller that was inspired by her trips to that area of Sudan. Miller traveled alongside Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist whose crusading stories highlighted the horrors of the civil war that has raged there since 2003.

Finally, at Next Theatre, there is Rogers’ “Madagascar” (a play that predated “The Overwhelming” and is driven by indirect references to Africa), directed by Kimberly Senior. Despite its title, which refers to the island nation in the Indian Ocean off the southeastern coast of Africa — a place very different from the rest of the continent — it is set in Rome. But according to Rogers, events that occurred in Madagascar “haunt the play’s [white] characters, and mean different things to each of them — evoking shame in one, and childhood peace, as well as loss in another.”

Although Rogers is widely traveled and “fascinated by the outside world” (the son of a political science professor, he lived in Malaysia and Indonesia as a child), he only made his first visit to Africa (a trip to Rwanda) in 2006.

“I do a great deal of research, but creativity is also wildly underrated,” quipped Rogers about his relative lack of first-hand experience of Africa. “I’m always proud when people who have been to a place I’ve written about say I got it exactly right.”

In Gurira’s “Eclipsed,” actress Alana Arenas plays Helena, a twentysomething woman who was captured as a young teenager. She now serves as the mother figure among a group of female prisoners of war forced to be “wives” to a Liberian warlord.

“My experience in the cast of ‘Black Diamond,’ which dealt with the same conflict, has helped me greatly,” said Arenas. “So have my travels in Africa.”

“I was part of a study abroad program, and visited Ghana about 10 years ago, and more recently I traveled to Morocco,” said Arenas, a Steppenwolf ensemble member.

“In Ghana, I began to realize how everything is about the community, while American culture is so individualistic.

“More recently, I watched a documentary about Senegal that left me thinking about how powerful the whole idea of custom can be in Africa, and how sad it is when poverty and war forces people to abandon their customs and who they really want to be.”

“But the women in this play grapple to hold on to certain things, despite their situation,” Arenas noted.

“And in real life, it was women whose ground-up protests even helped bring the war to an end. In fact, now Liberia [a nation established in the 19th century by freed American slaves] is even the first African country to elect a female president.”

In the TimeLine production of “In Darfur,” set in 2004, actress Mildred Marie Langford plays Hawa, a Darfuri Muslim woman of about 30 whose husband and son were systematically slaughtered in the civil war, and whose village was burned.

“Hawa, a fictional version of a real Darfuri woman, is from the northern capital of Khartoum, and she has found asylum at a refugee camp,” explained Langford. “Her father was a village chief who believed in education for his daughters, which was unusual, and she studied literature.”

Now, at the camp, Hawa is trying to regain some normalcy by teaching kids and trying to change their thought processes so they won’t turn to violence. A visiting journalist becomes interested in her story, but when her name is used in a column it creates even further danger for her. Complicating matters, too, is the fact that she is pregnant and not sure whether the father was her husband or the soldier who raped her.

“I’ve read so much about the atrocities against women there, and how they have managed to retain some sort of dignity and pride,” said Langford. “They have ‘the African heart’ — a deep love of their country that makes them hold onto the idea of returning home, and picking up the pieces of their lives.”

Though Langford has never visited Africa, she feels a deep affinity for the place.

“I grew up in Virginia, in an extremely diverse neighborhood that had many African, Indian and Latin people,” she said. “And my best friend, starting in seventh grade, was from Sierra Leone, and I’d go to parties and meet her family. I’ve also been in quite a few African-themed plays, including ‘Sarafina’ and ‘The Overwhelming’. But I still don’t understand why all the killing goes on. There is so much intermarriage. And they are all Africans.”

In Darfur

By Zac Thompson, Jan 23, 2011

In her 2006 drama about the genocide in Darfur, Miller uses a familiar convention from non-African depictions of Africa: The atrocity is presented primarily from the perspective of visiting Westerners, in this case a journalist for The New York Times (Simpkins) and a doctor for an international aid organization (Isaac). Miller, who spent time in Darfur as a research assistant for Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, says she wanted these characters to serve as an entry point for American audiences unfamiliar with the region and its conflicts. To this end, they spend much of the play delivering exposition, both in their awkward conversations with each other and in the reporter’s phone calls to her editor back in New York.

Though Miller touches on the ethics of printing the stories of victims who face retaliation from their government for speaking out, the journalistic concerns of the play are far less powerful than its human side, represented by a character named Hawa (movingly performed by Langford). She shows up at the camp for “internally displaced persons,” where the doctor works, after government-backed marauders have raided her village, raping her and killing her family in the process. An English teacher, Hawa clings to her education as if it were a sacred talisman and the last thing she has left, repeating over and over to herself the name “Lily Bart” (the heroine of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth). Her harrowing, heartbreaking experiences convey what mere facts cannot: the overwhelming disgrace of efforts to snuff out human life.

In Darfur

By Lawrence Bommer

By this July the south of Sudan will finally become its own nation,
finally halting the campaign of terror waged by Khartoum and its army
of Jangaweed militia. These barbarians were purportedly
defending the Arab herders of the western province of Darfur against
the animistic African farmers in the southern section. Whatever
the professed reasons, the conflict may have been the first war in
which global warming has acted as a catalyst. What began as a
drought a quarter century ago has grown into outright genocide, with
300,000 killed by starvation, disease or the systematic extermination
of Darfur villages by rape, pillage and murder, exacerbated by
Sudanese airplanes and the terrifying horsemen of Sudans
version of the Apocalypse. Happily, Sudans dictator Omar
Hassan al-Bashir is now a candidate for the International Criminal
Court, which may finally supply a modicum of justice, though
regrettably not retroactive.

Its hard to place a human face on so many thousands of awesome
atrocities, but thats the purpose of Winter Millers play
and also his protagonist, Maryka, a New York Times reporter modeled
on Nicholas Kristof. Its the spring of 2004 and she has
come to Khartoum to get permission to visit a camp in the Sudanese
desert, her goal a front-page story that will finally expose the
governments genocide for the awesome evil that it has become.

Maryka thinks shes found her face and story in the plight of
Hawa, an English teacher who has lost her entire family to the
sectarian violence. Worse, the baby she carries may not be her
husbands but the spawn of a rape by the government-sponsored
terrorist who violated her. But, as Maryka learns from Carlos,
the Argentine aid worker who introduces her to this poster girl for
genocide, Hawa may pay a terrible price for letting herself be
photographed and her name divulged in order to give Maryka the prize-winning
story she seeks.

Its
a terrible dilemma. If the victims stay silent and the world
is allowed to remain ignorant of these massive crimes against human
rights, the horrors will continue. But should Hawa suffer even
more in order to finally sensitize Americans to one more crime
against humanity on the violence-shaken African continent?
Was it worth it? is the question the audience must answer
as much as Maryka and her newspaper of record.

Nick Bowlings staging is as sensitive to this ethical crisis as
is this balanced and brave script, which gains even more
verisimilitude from occasional dialogue in Arabic with translations
supplied. Mildred Marie Langford plays the all-suffering Hawa
with the dignity of Antigone, her unsung courage a contrast to the
more human motivations of all around her. Kelli Simpkins is the
journalist weighing the human cost of seizing this story against the
greater harm of losing it. Despite a bad case of compassion
fatigue and humanitarian burn-out, Gregory Isaacs Carlos stands
up for the final rightprivacyof these much hurt I.D.P.s
(internally displaced persons). Tyla Abercrumbie provides
perspective as Marykas editor, her pristine office a contrast
to the burning films and projections designed by Mike Tutaj.
Ebony Wimbs is poignant as the Sudanese relief worker who becomes
collateral damage in this cruel saga.

This graphic backdrop makes In Darfur one of the most
cinematic treatments of history that TimeLine has createdand
thats saying a lot, given this companys commitment to
meta-theatrical realism. Yes, Hawas tragedy makes this
more real than the horrific statistics ever could. This is what
theater does best and why it has to be as immediate as the next
instant and as in-your-face as 3-D television will never be.